


the only place that i call home

by orphan_account



Category: Saturday Night Live
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-15
Updated: 2011-12-15
Packaged: 2017-10-27 08:47:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/293899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People think they hate each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the only place that i call home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ijemanja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ijemanja/gifts).



> This is possibly the... second? Needlers fic in the entire expanse of the internet, and I am both proud and sad about this fact. I also hope I did them justice because I feel I strayed a little from the ~style of the sketches these two were born from, even though I made sure to watch them all again to get the overall idea. Oh and I super apologise for all the bad, bad jokes, there is no excuse for them.
> 
> Happy Holidays!

 

People think they hate each other. And well, he can see why, really – they will never be the couple who kiss sweetly when he comes home from work, they will never hold hands while they wander down the street – but truthfully he has never really wanted that. He has always wanted a challenge, that fire to keep him on his toes pretty much ever since he knew what those words meant in relation to women. And that’s what Sally is. She has been from the day they met, when he first bumped into her (literally) on the stairs outside Classic Lit – which, by the way, is not the library or the cafeteria.

 

 

 _“Watch where you’re going, asshole,” she says, picking up a dropped textbook near her feet. He makes to apologise to the sweep of messy blonde hair in front of him, but when she looks up again she’s smirking, mouth tipped up in the corners._

 

Right off the bat, she thought he was gay.

 

 _“Are you going to say anything, or does being a homo make it impossible for you to talk to women?” she’s still got that infuriating smirk as she turns away from him, hopping up the last couple of steps._

 _He wants to say something witty that will wipe the sharp little grin off her face, but unfortunately he comes out with, “N-no, I’m not, not—well, does it make you a bitch?”_

 _She laughs, a light, rippling cackle that strangely warms the space around his heart, and turns back around, sticks out a tiny hand. “I’m Sally.” Notably, she doesn’t apologise for calling him a homo (and never has since, either), and raises an eyebrow when it takes him a full five seconds to stop staring at her sparkly nailpolish, dumbstruck, and actually take her hand in his. She grips like a vice, and when he lets go, subtly flexing his fingers to see if they’re broken, she snorts. “You shake like a girl.”_

 _Then she takes off up the corridor, disappearing into the lecture theatre without even asking his name._

 

 

 

 

 

For some reason, they never broke that habit, the barbs and the teasing, and from then on he was infatuated with her because of it. She finally learned his name about a week later at a keg party - after he’d watched her drink beer upside down for almost a minute straight, held up by a couple of burly football guys who could have supported her with a finger.

 

 _“Hey... Classic Lit guy,” she settles on, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth._

 _“Dan,” he answers, and she gives him a lazy salute before slapping his arm, her hand still damp with what he assumes is beer._

 _“I’m drunk.”_

 _“I’m not surprised; you just downed your entire weight in Budweiser.” He tries to make it sound like he’s impressed, because he is – that was a_ lot _of beer – but apparently it came out wrong._

 _“What is it with you and insulting ladies, dude? Just because you don’t like them—”_

 _“I’m not gay!” he says a little too loud, and several drunken college students turn to look. Sally’s expression is sceptical._

 _“Hmm. No, you dress way too well for a straight guy.” Without waiting for a retaliation, she heads for the table filled with plastic cups full of non-descript alcohol and bowls of pretzels and starts chatting to a group of girls._

 _She finds him again a half hour later, surprisingly steady on her feet for the amount of alcohol she’s consumed, and leans on the wall next to him at the back of the room, plucking his lukewarm beer from his hands. “So Dan, I’m curious - what is it about penises that you like so much?” Her smirk is lazy, boozed, but her eyes are bright and laughing at him over the cup she brings to her mouth._

 _“That they’re designed to go in girls.”_

 _She snorts and spits at the same time, flat beer flying everywhere – but she doesn’t think twice about it, doubling over from laughter, her cackle almost maniacal (and totally, utterly adorable). He laughs too, mostly at her because that was a terrible joke, and waits for her to look at him again. She straightens, and swipes a finger into the corners of her eyes to get rid of the tears._

 _“Oh my god. You are_ so _gay, who even says that?!”_

 _“I am one hundred percent not.”_

 _She squares up to him as well as she can with the height difference, and cocks her head, looking almost serious. “All right then, prove it.” Her eyes shine with the provocation, dipping to his mouth and back up again._

 _Determined to make her believe him, he slides a thumb across her jaw and lowers his mouth to hers, his other hand going to her lower back. She immediately kisses back, all sloppy tongue and little nips at his top lip, and in this state he’s pretty sure it’s the best kiss he’s ever had. He winds his hands into her hair, slides his tongue along hers, runs it across the line of her teeth. She makes a tiny sound, sucks on his bottom lip, and he feels like he could stand here forever, probably._

 _Pulling back just enough so that his tongue has to retreat back to his own mouth, she murmurs, “I’m still not buying it,” and he can feel the grin against his lips._

 _He feels a surge of something, that rise of a challenge that will come to feel so familiar, and he roughly shoves her back into the wall, mouth fusing to the column of her neck as he grinds into her so she can feel how damn hard he is just from kissing her - this girl who he barely knows but thinks he might love, delighting in her gasp of “Oh,_ there _it is,” as she hitches her leg up around his and thrusts back against him with equal measure._

 

He remembers cursing the fact that she was wearing cut-offs instead of a dress that night, and also later telling her that he “sometimes liked to paint” because she possibly laughed harder at that than she did his penis comment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first time they had sex she gave him a list of things she didn’t like, and he knew then he would never meet a girl like her again (some highlights, while she struggled with the clasp of her bra and the zipper on his jeans: “It’s not a marathon, you know? Just as long as you’re not done after thirty seconds it’s really fine with me if we’re finished in like five minutes”; “I am definitely going to laugh at you if you try to dirty talk me,”; and his personal favourite “Don’t poke around like you’re digging for treasure or something, okay? It’s not a turn on.”).

 

 _“Oh, you would say that.”_

 _She pinches his nipple and twists until he holds his hands up in surrender, then leans in close to his face. “Yeah, I would.”_

 

 

 

 

 

 

They get worse the longer they’re together and they break up every month like it’s an anniversary, spitting out hateful tirades like they couldn’t loathe each other more if they tried. In truth, it does the opposite, drives them closer together, turns them on even more than the last time. Sometimes it takes a day, sometimes a week or two, but they’ve always come back. Usually it’s in the middle of the night, although one memorable time Sally turned up at 6am in their last week of college almost physically shaking with need, her eyes burning.

 

 

 _“I’ve had to get myself off in the shower at least six times in the last two days, and you need to fix that. Now.”_

 _He immediately picks her up, her legs gripping his hips, lets her slip her tongue into his mouth without pretence, carrying her to his cursedly small bed and groaning into her collarbone as she slips her hands inside his sweatpants. Things are a blur from there (in his defence, he was asleep before she started banging on his door), all hands and mouths and the wonderful slide of her skin against his. Also, for the record, he takes her list into account and would like to think his technique is much more masterful than an idiot digging for treasure (even if that’s a little what it feels like)._

 

 

 

It escalates as they get older. When they go looking for their first apartment together they have a shouting match about curtains in front of the realtor and have to excuse themselves so he can fuck her in the bathroom (because it’s always fucking, never love-making or sleeping together or even sex, no, with Sally it’s always been _fucking_ ), her shoulder blades squeaking rhythmically against the mirror, his teeth sunk into the muscle sloping from her neck.

 

Naturally, they don’t get that apartment (and they also have to find a new realtor).

 

 

 

 

 

 

But one of the worst public fights, he remembers, was at his company Christmas party in 2006. He’d gotten home later than he wanted because of traffic and Sally was on the couch watching Ellen reruns, and things just went downhill from there. She didn’t wear a bra just to piss him off and purposefully pretended not to hear him when he tried to introduce her to his boss.

 

 _“Are you trying to get me fired?” he asks in a fierce whisper, after pulling her away from his extremely confused and disturbed employer._

 _“Oh of course, because it’s all about you, isn’t it?”_

 _It’s not, really, it’s all about her and always has been, always will be – and he wouldn’t change it for anything._

 _“What exactly do you want me to do, Sally?! This is_ my _company’s party in_ my _company’s office!”_

 _She steps closer to him, shields him from the view of any prying eyes, then unabashedly palms the front of his dress pants, biting her lip. “I want you to fuck me.”_

 

 

He did, obviously, on the desk in his office, and hoped his boss didn’t decide to come by right at the moment Sally was screaming out his name (the right one) just to make him thrust into her harder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dan’s pretty sure they’ll die this way. People will still think they hate each other, and they’ll bickering until the end, embarrassing countless people in endless public areas, and you know what?

 

That suits him just fine.


End file.
